The development of various voice over IP protocols such as the H.323 Recommendation and the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) has led to increased interest in multimedia conferencing. In such conferencing, typically, a more or less central server manages the conference and maintains the various communications paths. Parties to the conference are able to communicate via voice and/or video through the server.
Instant messaging can provide an added dimension to multimedia conferences. In addition to allowing text chatting, instant messaging systems such as Microsoft Windows Messenger can allow for transfer of files, document sharing and collaboration, collaborative whiteboarding, and even voice and video.
As can be appreciated, a complete multimedia conference can involve multiple voice and video streams, the transfer of many files, and much marking-up of documents and whiteboarding. On occasion, an individual who is not a party to all or part of the conference may nevertheless find it necessary to review what was said. While a messaging server or individual clients may be able to record or store an entirety of such a conference, the reviewing party may not wish to replay the entire meeting, including all the irrelevant comments and dead ends typical in any multiparty collaboration. Moreover, simply recording an entirety of a conference provides no indication of the relative importance of various portions of the conference.
As such, there is a need for a system and method for easily reviewing a multimedia conference. There is a further need for a system and method for accessing particular portions of a multimedia conference upon review. There is a further need for a system and method for determining the relative importance of portions of a conference.